“There. There she is.”
Knox pointed at the computer screen we were using in a security room off the lobby of Emme’s building. Unconsciously, I moved closer.
“Sorry, man. You have to stay back.”
I obliged Knox’s command, fisting my hands in my pockets. Knox was doing a huge solid by letting me in this room, but as an observer only. He couldn’t have me within reaching distance of the keyboard, or even smear distance from the screen, for risk of tainting the evidence. Whether I accepted it or not, I had a history with Emme, one police might want to explore. But Knox owed me one, after I got his sister off on a DUI. She’d had a terrible relationship with cocaine, and it took ramming her car into a tree and barely scraping out to slightly wake her up. It then took the threat of serious jail time and a felony record to pry her eyes wide open. With my help, we could reduce her charges substantially with her promise of entering rehab. At seventeen, it seemed Lucy Knox had already lived thirty.
Knox didn’t forget a favor like that. I wasn’t about to call in a favor like that. But there was an unspoken agreement between us, an evenness to our friendship, and Knox wouldn’t tip the balance. By allowing me limited access to surveillance footage, Knox was adding weight to the scale. It didn’t matter if I demanded it or not—he wanted to do what he felt was justifiably owed.
We began watching footage that morning but started focusing in at three hours before Emme’s arrival, around 6 PM, to see if we could spot any suspicious movement. So far, there was none. The footage was grainy, as most cheap security systems were, and while I preferred an HD-quality silver platter with this guy on it, I had to accept what I received, because any clue could bring me closer to Emme. I’d take a pebble cascading across the deserted sidewalk at this point.
And then Emme appeared. Coming in to the right of the screen, huddled against the cold, nothing but a white slash of her forehead peeping out between her giant scarf and beanie. Typical, her legs were practically bare as she toddled forward in high heels and a pencil skirt.
My Emme. My girl—though she’d never let me call her that out loud, saying the only entities that could argue ownership over her was her corporate dependence on tampons and coffee shops. In my mind, however, she’d been everything. Seeing her for the first time was enough, when she stepped into our first college class together (late), her espresso-brown hair tangling freely around her face and carrying with them the crisp scent of the city in autumn. She plonked down a few seats behind me, making all the noise in the world as she dug through her bag and apologized profusely, unaware or maybe immune to the death-beams coming from her new professor.
When her water bottle, stainless steel, clattered to the floor and echoed across the lecture hall with the grace of a wildebeest stampede, I covered a smirk. It was enough to have her looking up from her crouch on the floor and pinning me with her own beams of promised destruction, and my beguiling chuckle turned into a choke. As I coughed into my hand, she arched a brow and held her canteen over the chair separating us. She said loudly, “Need a drink?”
Four years ago turned into yesterday. Standing here with Knox and an overweight, over-tired security guard slumped in a rolling chair between us did nothing to prevent the monsoon that was this woman from pulling me under. Back to her.
“She’s going into the doors. See anything behind her?”
Knox’s voice had the film over my vision turning to smoke, and I peered closer at the screen.
Emme’s only company on the street was blackened windows and white concrete. Peaks of sludgy snow framed the gutters and curbs of the street. A few cars were parked on the side, some blatantly disregarding the alternate-side parking rules of winter. Maybe one of them was her kidnapper. But no, the windows remained a solid black, any reflections muted by the evening. No movement came behind her.
“Switch to inside,” Knox said.
The guard did as he was told, one mouse click bringing Emme back to us as she entered the lobby and danced across the tiles with a warm-up shimmy. We had a birds’ eye view, above the elevator, as she rubbed her hands together and mouthed something.
“What do you think she’s saying? Is she talking to someone we can’t see?” Knox asked.
“Nah. She’s telling Jack Frost to go fuck himself,” I said.
That drew a smile from Knox.
After a few more seconds, Emme stepped out of view. My jaw locked at the thought of her disappearing. I knew it was coming—an unavoidable nightmare—but right now we had her, healthy, cranky and whole. “We got an elevator shot anywhere?” I asked.
“In a sec,” the guard—Stan was written on his nameplate—said.
He shifted us to inside the elevator. We only had one monitor to go on, so Stan had his job cut out for him as he bounced between shots, but so far, he was doing it seamlessly and without complaint. Abduction, regardless of its intent, tended to awaken the most lethargic of individuals.
Emme inserted something into the button panel and turned it.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A key,” Stan replied. “To access the floor.”
Emme was still attempting to get warm, giving a few knee bends into the air and rubbing her arms. She unwrapped her scarf, exposing her features to us, and even glanced up, right through the screen.
It was a second, a sliver of time, before her attention went elsewhere, but in that split between then and now I was in front of her, bent on one knee and giving her the rest of my life.
They were blue, those irises of hers. Not ice blue or pale or sky. Azure, and they could turn liquid with passion at the most inopportune times. Like finals or just before job interviews or at her job or spending the night with her parents. But always, I would cave. Touch her skin, kiss her breasts, find her pleasure the instant she moaned in my hands.
Too soon, she went out of frame. I stared, unblinking at the empty elevator, motionless pixels of white and grey, willing her to reappear.
“Let’s see the loft then,” I said.
But Stan shook his head. Poor Stan, he was about to get side-punched in the temple if he was going to say what I thought he was.
“This building is primarily used for rented-out event space. The six lofts are privately owned by one guy, so we don’t have cameras on the floors. Only when she gets back in the elevator—”
“You ready for this?” Knox cut in by holding onto my shoulder, his detailed note-taking (how much did he write down? What was he seeing that I wasn’t?) taking second chair to my increasing edginess.
Good buddy that he was, Knox had no idea that discomfort was the smallest aspect of my fury. Sour temper roiled in my gut, growing teeth. I swallowed down its fork-toothed tongue.
“Roll it,” I said.
“You sure? Maybe I should watch this first—”
“No.” The word was sharper than I intended. “I wouldn’t be here if I couldn’t handle it.”
“I have no doubt, Spence, but I’m already breaking protocol having you here, and by the look on your face, I’m thinking I may’ve severely miscalculated where your off switch is.”
Stan cast a wary eye on me.
“You think I’m about to toss this room? Barrel out of here using Stan as a barricade until I find the motherfucker that has Emme?” I asked. Stan went stiff. “I’m not stupid. I won’t compromise anything that could save her.”
Knox let a few beats to pass between us, while I allowed him the time to inevitably relent.
“You do anything that makes me think you’re about to nuke this place, I’m kicking your ass out. I love you like a brother, but even you can’t know what could hurt this situation in your heightened state right now. You’ve got to let me do what I do best.”
I nodded. He was right, obviously. I was what we called a “witness,” maybe even a potential suspect until I’m officially crossed off the list. The one thing I wasn’t was a detective assigned to Emme. Or a prosecutor on her case. But maybe, maybe, I could help her as the man who’d loved every part of her.
“I’ll be good, Knox. We’re wasting time,” I said.
Knox gestured at Stan to fast-forward until Emme was back in frame and in the elevator.
With someone else.
“What the fu…pause. I said pause!” I yelled. Emme was almost completely covered by another body. The whites of her hands were blurred, frozen on tape as they flailed. One leg was exposed. She’d lost a heel, and I knew where it was. Discarded on the floorboards of the fourth floor amidst evidence cards, blood splatter and camera flashes.
But those facts had to recede to the hard drive of my brain, to be accessed with perfect detail later. Other facts were rolling in, zipping by until I found the relevant one. “There’s got to be a staircase, fire escape, something that allowed him to avoid the cameras and get to the loft without us seeing. Go back out. I want to see the outside of the building at the time Emme was riding the elevator.”
Stan was nodding along to my staccato demands, but not fast enough. “Do it!” I said, and he cowered.
“The building is six floors, one loft on each,” he said. “The elevator opens up directly to each one. Normally, to access the floor, you need to insert a key beside the button corresponding to your floor, like the lady did when she entered. Without one, he wouldn’t be able to get where he wanted.”
“And likely he knew there’d be a camera in the elevator, like most in the city,” Knox said.
“There’s a fire escape, but it’s outside. At the front of the building,” Stan said.
Knox nodded. “And narrow. Easy to get up with one person, not so simple to drag a screaming and fighting victim down.”
“If he got her unconscious, it still wouldn’t be easy to descend firefighter style,” I added. “In public view. The elevator was his only option to exit with her. Show me. Show me the outside.”
After a few painful fumbles, Stan had us back to the front of the building. One, two, three…there.
“Dark van,” I said. Only the hood could be seen and half of a front tire. The rest of it was off tape. “It wasn’t there before.”
Knox inched closer to me to get a better look at the left side of the image. Stan, my good man, had the wherewithal to freeze the image as soon as I pointed.
“I see it,” Knox said, then scribbled something on his pad. “We have foot patrol out canvassing other buildings, stores around here. Maybe there’s a camera shot of the license plate.”
I murmured in agreement, though we both knew the chances of that would be too good to be true. Especially if the license plate turned out not to be stolen and led us straight to the fucker’s door.
“Were any of these lofts occupied?” I asked, inventorying every pixel on the screen. The sole of a shoe. The profile of a pant leg. A knuckle. The fucking tip of a nose, I didn’t care. Anything that caught the bastard on camera. “Or did he know that Emme would be the only person in this building?”
“No one was renting space last night,” Stan said.
“So, no risk of running into anybody as he descended,” Knox said. “Shit.”
Stan hit play, and we saw nothing. It went without saying, but for prosperity’s sake, I asked him, “Don’t suppose you had a guard on duty last night.”
With great reluctance, Stan shook his head. “We’re an outside company. One of us is here part-time, usually only when space is rented. Owner doesn’t want to pay for much else.”
I crossed my arms. “Damn it.”
“He knew the layout of this place and how to get out of shot. He canvassed,” Knox said, but wasn’t enlightening anyone in particular. His scribbles matched his mutters. “I’ll contact the owner. He’s got to have records of who rents what and when. Maybe this guy had access to the calendar somehow…”
I rubbed a hand down my face, my palm coming to rest against my chin. “Go back to the elevator.”
The air in the small room became thick, no one occupying it eager to watch the next film.
And it stayed that way. Emme’s struggle was witnessed in silence. She rolled out of her kidnapper’s arms, but was caught by the wrist and brought back. She blurred in and out of focus as her movements were both quick and slow, bites and kicks, her lips torn open with a constant, unheard scream. He lifted her once, her hair covering his face, then he slammed her to the ground. Disoriented, stunned, she heaved onto her arms but was felled with a punch. He lifted her slack body and threw her over his shoulder, which must have shocked her awake because she came alive again, limbs diving and spearing for any piece of him. As she was forcibly dragged off camera, my last image was her expression.
Sheer, total terror.
We stared at the monitor, time ticking on, even though each one of us knew she wouldn’t be appearing again.
“Outside,” I croaked. Stan came out of his horrified fugue enough to switch cameras, and there was Emme, her pale legs being dragged through slush. She escaped at one point, bolted to the right and for a few seconds we didn’t see her. But she was chased, pulled back and thrown to the left, out of view again. The next thing we saw were headlights of the dark van flashing on, sludge spewing from the moving tires as the van reversed, then came into full side-view as he drove down the street.
No one said anything after that. Knox’s notebook had fallen to his side and I understood that he’d be going through this footage multiple times, nonstop, until every detail was fashioned behind his eyelids in such a way that he wouldn’t sleep without dreaming of her.
“White or Latino male, around six-two, two-hundred and forty pounds,” I began, my words a rough cut of air into the fogged room. “Thick shoulders, heavy down jacket either navy blue or black, dark denim jeans. Hood obscuring the top half of face, a… scarf?...covering his chin. Gloves, but there’s enough space between those and his sleeve to catch a glimpse of skin, hence the likelihood of being Caucasian or Latino or Asian. Fuck. No visible scars or tattoos. Violent, aggressive enough to incapacitate someone even when there is no likelihood of them being able to fight back.”
Knox met my gaze, his mouth formed in a tight, grim line.
“Play it again,” I said to Stan, ignoring the warning.
The walls around me went stark white. Stan’s bland uniform blended with his skin, turning into a spotty grey. Knox’s color paled, too, until everyone—everything—around me was in various stages of black and white. I stepped into the footage, my hands in front of me in colorless movement, until I stood next to the kidnapper, his arms frozen into a chokehold around Emme. Emme’s mouth was stretched wide, her mouth a black hole of a scream.
The ghost of Spencer past roiled within until it was writhing in my throat. It would be so easy to grab this guy by the neck and catapult him into the elevator walls. To punch and pummel until his brains leaked out and his face was grey pulp.
Yeah, old Spence, had he been there, would’ve done just that.
Now, all I could do was stand and picture myself within grainy security tape, fantasizing about saving a woman who’d already been abducted.
What Knox may not yet understand but would come to soon, was that I was going to dream of Emme, too.